Mechanical Inertia and Economic Dynamics: Pareto on Business Cycles

Mauro Boianovsky and Vincent J. Tarascio

Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 1998, vol. 20, issue 1, 5-23

Abstract: In the second volume of his Cours, published a hundred years ago, Vilfredo Pareto (1897, section 928) put forward what was probably the first mathematical model of the business cycle. Apart from Knut Wicksell's (1899) review of Pareto's book and Jess Benhabib's (1979) short article (partly based on Wicksell's comments), Pareto's model has gone unnoticed. According to the view advanced by Pareto in the 1890s, concepts from physics are essential, not only in the realm of static equilibrium, but also in the investigation of economic dynamics. The model follows a new presentation by Pareto of his equations of general equilibrium, where he attempted to take into account the influence of “inertia” (habit) by applying d'Alembert's principle of mechanics. He concludes that the solution to the consumption equations has a cyclical pattern and uses that to explain business cycles as oscillations in aggregate production driven by changes in consumption.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:jhisec:v:20:y:1998:i:01:p:5-23_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().